Vacancies
by lenina20
Summary: The Originals Fic, post 1x07. After Marcel acts on Tyler's tip, kidnapping Hayley, Elijah demands to know why Klaus spared him. As he comes clean, Rebekah finds the means to strike back. Klaus Elijah Rebekah. Klaroline. Implied Haylijah and Rebel. Lots of Klaus Tyler feelings.


**Hello guys, here is a one-shot inspired by the recent crossover in The Originals.**

* * *

It's been over a thousand years of constant anger and betrayal, and he doesn't think he remembers ever feeling rage like this.

"Why, Niklaus?" His fists clench in an impotent mockery of the violence that's too deeply ingrained to be ever set off. "Why didn't you just kill him?"

Mercy upon the hands of his brother is unthinkable, and yet he doesn't even show the decency of looking repentant in the slightest. He is pure arrogance as always, every pore of his dead and rotten carcass. He doesn't shrug in contempt, but almost. Like he truly doesn't care. Like they were right all along, and it's of no mind to him that the girl dies. That the child is not born,

Four neat drinks, and Rebekah is doing exceptionally well at containing her hysteria. Only her eyes are on fire, narrowed and burning with a visible spark of true hatred when she looks at Klaus. "Not even going to scrap for an excuse, brother?"

In response doesn't even flinch. He hits back without a thought. "You led Marcel to our home, Rebekah. To Hayley. Have I killed _you_, maybe?"

She is not offended by his accusation, but her derisive snort sounds heart-breaking to Elijah. When she shakes her head and smiles, the gesture is a perfect mixture of sadness and contempt. But then she turns her face to look at Elijah and her eyes open, her expression oddly relaxes. "He didn't kill Tyler because he made a promise," she simply says.

* * *

The metamorphosis is immediate.

His jaw clenches; his back muscles clench visibly. He bows his back almost unnoticeably, but still Elijah realizes. His brother is readying to launch for an attack.

"Rebekah…"

If she registers the threat, she reacts with complete indifference. She whips her hair and turns to look at him with a question in her eyes. "Just tell me brother, was that an act of true love or of pure selfishness?" She sharpens her claws and rolls her shoulders, in an instant looking as malevolent as Elijah has ever seen her. She laughs dryly. "Don't bother answering that."

Elijah's grabs her eyes the second she's done biting, only needs to raise an eyebrow to pose his question.

"Klaus didn't kill his little stray dog because he knows that if he does, Caroline will never forgive him."

* * *

The rage burns out so quickly that Elijah almost staggers on his feet. Who knew confusion could be such a powerful force? He turns his face to his brother, for a second feeling too intrigued to remember how desperately he wants to rip his heart off his chest and watch with a smirk as he attempts to stick it back in. And so he asks, "Caroline? Is that Tyler's girl? The one you said you went after?" A blurry face emerges in his brain. Blonde ringlets and a dire expression. A red jacket, bright as blood among the darkness of the forest. He remembers, but cannot believe. "The doppelganger's friend"

Impossibly nonchalant, face impassive as a rock, Klaus reaches for the decanter and a lowball glass that are sitting on a nearby table. He pours himself a drink, but doesn't look like he needs it at all when he raises his unclouded gaze to Elijah. "Well, she isn't Tyler's girl anymore."

Puzzlement brews, unexpectedly. He catches himself fighting off a lopsided smile of disbelief. "Are you telling me you have a secret girlfriend you have so far neglected to mention?"

Klaus only acknowledges the ridiculousness of such a suggestion with a stony glare. In a breath, his eyes have flown to tackle Rebekah's eye-roll. "By the way, baby sister. I am not you." He aims the bow, shoots the poisoned arrow unflinchingly, without a second's notice. "I did not spare the boy to earn Caroline's forgiveness. Unlike you I have no delusions that any day now Caroline is going to open her eyes and magically realize I am not the monster she mistook me for and fall madly in love with me with the turn of the tide."

Perhaps it's the merciless punch straight to Rebekah's throat, the way his scorn wraps itself around her heart, squeezing until unshed tears brim in her eyes, but quicker than it had burnt out it blazes anew. The rage. Unforgiving.

His words are a sentence, wielded like a sword. "Then why, brother? Why spare the life a man who threatened your family?"

Klaus catches the menacing undercurrent in Elijah's question without a blink, as expected. But unpredictably, he replies to it with a smile. For half a second before he speaks, the glint of emotion in his eyes looks genuine. "Well, I suppose by this stage I should own up to it, shouldn't I?"

He goes quiet for an instant, and before he speaks again, Elijah tries to make a guess so as to what it is that his brother seems ready to confess. He comes up with nothing, and thus can only stare blankly at him when he continues, his voice low, his grin so tight it looks on the verge of snapping.

"As it happens, Bonnie Bennett is dead," he explains, making an immediate pause for effect. The unexpected declaration hangs heavy over their living room. Neither Elijah, nor Rebekah could have ever guessed, or cared; and yet, what comes after— "Caroline just lost her best friend. I'm not sure she could handle it, losing the boy she loves too."

* * *

The silence that spreads between them is thick and heavy and seems so unreal and so unbreakable that Elijah's thoughts cannot even pass through. He tries to understand, to decode what it may mean, what Klaus has just admitted to. But all he gets is the moist silence inside the house, echoing with the far-away sounds of the early autumn outside. Seconds and more seconds of a blank, clotted silence follow, and it continues to grow and rise and stretch until, at last, it explodes.

Rebekah's horselaugh, loud and irreverent, rattles through the house like a sizzling firecracker, until they can no longer hear the song of the cicadas.

* * *

After Elijah's incredulity begins to solidify into full-grown mistrust and Rebekah concludes her contemptuously delighted counter-strike, Klaus persists in smiling with disinterest, pouring himself a second drink. It's getting dark outside, but none of them moves to switch on the lights.

Darkness becomes them well, and Klaus's throaty whisper slides through like a snake.

"Good news is, brother, I trust Tyler not to put Caroline's life in danger, so at least I know he won't be ratting to Marcel about her."

It's yet another unrepentant blow. He halts his speech halfway the way he likes to do. Lets the words hang over between them, floating over the density of the accusation that trembles right beneath the words he doesn't say. He plays the role he's been given, after all. And he plays it well, and enjoys every second of it, very much, pretending to be this heartless. Making a jab like this at the expense of his own flesh and blood and having it mean nothing. His girl is safe, his silence is screaming. Elijah's latest whim might be dead already.

Klaus doesn't give a damn, you see.

It's a game about a cat and a mouse, and it only stops when he says it does.

When he gets impatient after Elijah refuses him the satisfaction of squirming beneath his all-powerful thumb.

Eventually.

* * *

"Okay, okay," he laughs, low and devilish. He looks genuinely playful, almost childlike when his face splits up in the most arrogant and self-satisfying grin he has sported in a while. "You don't have to worry, brother. And you can tell your little friend the witch to stop fretting, too. Hayley's safe."

He doesn't elaborate, of course, and once again Elijah feels the rage flaring up when, shamefully, he recognizes he has no chance but to play along. His voice comes out strained and pitifully, uncharacteristically small when he asks, "How do you know?"

Klaus's malevolent grin does not ever relent. "Remember when you agreed to keep me desiccated in a box for the life-expanse of two generations, to spare the life of the doppelganger?"

This time there is no shame as he parries and repels the strike. He even returns the smile, but subdued. "I do remember. I believe that was the night I met your Caroline, actually. I remember her more clearly now, and I seem to recall her throwing a party to celebrate your desiccation." His arrival had interrupted them; the mood had quickly shifted when Elena had opened the door and seen him there, ready to barter for his brother's life. "Later, she kindly kept me company in the woods as I awaited Rebekah, who had gone to retrieve your body."

The words, of course, are charged.

There's the blatant taunt, about this girl in Mystic Falls being happy to see Klaus dumped in the ocean for all of eternity; but the truth is the gibe barely conceals the underlying peace offering. _I kept you from being buried in the ocean, brother. Do you remember?_ They've been going in circles for a thousand years, and it doesn't even surprise Elijah anymore, that the certainty that this is no different comes as a comfort.

Klaus's smiled-shaped retort brings him no peace, though. "But I wasn't in that body, brother. I was in _Tyler_'s body, in a cave. With Caroline, eventually. Meanwhile Tyler was in that body that mother's monster was trying to burn to ashes. That's how he saved my life that night, choosing that he'd die rather than I did. To protect the lives of his friends. Which is precisely my point, you see, Elijah? Just like you couldn't kill Elena Gilbert, when her death would have meant our freedom from mother's attempts to kill us, Tyler Lockwood is not going to let any harm come to an unborn baby, no matter how many hybrids I could sire with her blood."

* * *

"You're going to rely the life of your child on the good will of this boy you've done nothing but hurt?" His voice is calm, his tone again cold and rocklike. The rage is burning bright, fire crackling in a steady rhythm that matches seamlessly the slow thumping of his heart. "You killed his _mother_, Niklaus."

Moving to sit on the armchair by the window, Klaus ignores him for a second. He digs the phone out of his back pocket and toys with it as he crosses his legs and leans back on the big chair. "Not just the good will of his heart, no," he admits, bending his head as his lips twitch up. "I may rely on a bit of emotional blackmail as well. You see, I'm going to let Caroline handle this one."

For the first time in a while, Rebekah intervenes. Elijah is surprised at the good humour in her voice. "Well, we're alright then, I suppose. What's there to worry about if Caroline's coming to save us?"

It'd be easy for Klaus to ignore her, from the far-end of the couch where she has gone to sit and wait this disaster out. But he doesn't. He even looks at her with a trace of kindness in his eyes that doesn't seem to fit the circumstances at all. "She's not coming," he explains, strangely patient. "She's making a phone call, and the only thing she intends to save with her actions is Tyler's soul, not the rest of us. Her words, not mine."

He sounds amused. Endeared. Enthralled.

If anything, the unfamiliar dread that creeps up Elijah's lungs only contributes to feed his misgivings. "Why do you think that will work? He left her and came here with the sole intention of killing your child."

Klaus doesn't miss a beat, like every question demands an answer that's been scripted, rehearsed and memorized in advance, every time. "He left her because he knows that the only reason they can be together is because I allow it." He says it like it means nothing, moves on to the second part of his answer in the same breath. "But Caroline loves this boy, or rather, she loves what this boy represents. She's not going to let him do something irredeemable, even if she has to come down here and put a stop to it herself."

For a second, Elijah doesn't get it.

But then Rebekah speaks again. "So that's the emotional blackmail, huh?" She sounds almost impressed, and Elijah's attention quickly flies to her. "Either he backs off, or Caroline will draw herself into the fray. She must have really special lady parts, this girl. Seeing how the outcome of the largest supernatural war this world has seen in centuries depends entirely on what two men are willing to sacrifice to earn her forgiveness."

"I don't understand." For the first time, and without intending to, Elijah voices out his stupefaction. Quickly, confusion takes the shape of accusation. "You claim to care for this girl enough that you spared the life of Tyler Lockwood, knowing the threat he posed not only to the life of your child but also to your fate in this war, only so that she wouldn't be in pain. Yet now you're willing to draw her into this."

There's a laugh.

It's so low that Elijah feels it reverberate across the room, full of sadness. It's so low, that he can't be entirely sure that it has come out of his brother's chest and not from somewhere deep beneath the floorboards, where perhaps the ghosts are listening.

* * *

"I bit Caroline once," he says, at last. "I wanted to hurt Tyler the way he wants to hurt me now, so I went after what he loved the most. I figured, it could after all do me good to be rid of her. She was making me… distracted."

He speaks like a true story-teller, and Elijah feels an unexpected chill running up his ancient bones as he conjures up the scene. Perhaps, he gathers, residue from the werewolf poison that he so recently endured by the grace of his brother's fangs. It seems to be a favourite punishment of his, for those that irritate him. He wants to ask, but knows he needs not.

"You know what Tyler did when I bit his girlfriend, when she had only hours to live and only asked to be taken away where she wouldn't have to look at me?" Klaus continues without being prompted, after only seconds of remembrance. "He picked her fragile, delirious, quickly rotting body and laid it on the couch, in a room I had been trapped in. He said, you want her to die, you're going to have to watch her die. And then he left."

For Elijah, it's only the last in a rather long string of unexpected revelations.

Klaus doesn't need to finish the story for him to understand.

The point is not that his brother couldn't bring himself to hurt the girl, in the end. Regardless of what they would like to believe, often times, Niklaus has never been heartless. Perhaps it is true and the unthinkable has come to happen, but the point of the story is not that, by what he tells and what he doesn't, Klaus's love for this small-town teenage vampire might be real, against all odds.

The point is that Tyler Lockwood took a bet on him, when nobody else would.

When there was no reason to bet on him.

And he won.

So all Klaus says is, "No harm will come to Caroline."

* * *

It's almost sunrise when Rebekah presses the dial button.

She's out in the grounds, away from unwanted ears. Away from the ghosts and the memories that only grief her.

Away from the shadow of guilt sowed to her tailbones that she knows will eventually catch up to her, even if takes another thousand years for exhaustion to take over and slow down her strides.

"Rebekah, sweet—"

She doesn't allow him a word further than her name. She doesn't allow him a breath. She squeezes her eyes shut and holds her breath and spits out the words. "If you don't return Hayley to us by sundown today, I will rip your heart off your chest long before you ever see me coming." Still she doesn't breathe. She doesn't open her eyes. She doesn't imagine the shock, the anger, the betrayal or the disbelief at the other end of the line. "If you want to get to my brother, I have something else you can use."

Eyes open or closed it makes no difference. She still sees her sitting on the floor of that pantry, her back against the freezer, blood spilling onto the floor from the torn wrists draped over her lap. She remembers Matt's frantic desperation, the warm smile on his face when he thanked her on Caroline's behalf. She remembers the surge of relief, the weight being lifted off her chest when the clouds faded from Caroline's eyes.

_Bitch_.

Her hands are shaking so violently that she drops the phone to the ground when she tries to hang up.

It's okay, she tells herself.

This is what will set her free.

This is what Klaus deserves, more than any other fate.

He has taken away, hasn't he, every love that has ever grazed her heart.

* * *

**.end**

**And, once again, Rebekoline takes over yet another of my fics. I can't believe I just did this. Like, seriously, go to my tumblr, theelliedoll, and you'll see that my sidebar image is Rebekah's relieved expression after she manages to draw Caroline back from Silas's compulsion. I really can't believe my re-reading of We Are Infinite has taken me to this terrible place of wanting to write Rebekoline angst but, alas—**

**This is intended as a one-shot. I have little interest in Rebekah conspiring with Marcel so I don't have plans to revisit this scenario. However, if I can find a way to spin this scenario into a feast of Rebekoline feels and angst, and if the muse inspires, I may be back. But I do believe I'm better at this when I stick to one-shots, so that's what this is as of right now.**

**Thanks for reading as always. I hope you enjoyed it!**


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